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I found it very hard not to be distracted by the visual pleasure of Robert Walpole’s great mansion, whose interiors are so surprisingly well preserved.

We went upstairs in the old 1920s service lift:-

Robert Walpole himself presides over the Stone Hall in a bust by Rysbrack:-

Through the Saloon is the White Drawing Room with a chimneypiece of Aurora, flanked by Caryatids:-

Beyond is the Green Velvet Bedchamber, with one of the best state beds I have ever seen, still opulently baroque and apparently designed by William Kent:-

Good tapestry too:-

In the north-east corner is the Cabinet Room, originally hung with pictures, but now with a dressing table looking out to the park:-

And a carved bird which I was told was a Ho Ho bird:-

Both up and down the lift, I admired the log basket:-

Houghton (2)

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We drove up to Houghton to see their exhibition EARTH SKY of work by Richard Long in the house and gardens.

First, a large work, North South East West, dominating the palatial Palladianism of the central Stone Hall:-

Outside, immediately in front of the house on the long lawn stretching out to a distant ha-ha is A Line in Norfolk:-

Beyond, at the end of the formal garden in front of the house with the ride beyond, is Full Moon Circle:-

In the two service ranges flanking the house were White Water Falls:-

Remote in a corner of the formal garden was Houghton Cross :-

And in the parkland White Deer Circle:-

Richard Long

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I have been reading Mark Girouard’s Friendships, soon to be published, which records his very extensive circle of friends, all now dead, from the 1950s onwards.   Some of them are already well known, like John Betjeman with whom he collaborated on the establishment of the Victorian Society (‘dear little Mark, so good, and never says a word’) and Denys Lasdun, whose National Theatre both Betjeman and Girouard admired.   But some of them are much less well known, like Gervase Mathew, the grubby Byzantinist and author of Byzantine Aesthetics and Dominic de Grunne, a Belgian Catholic who taught Indian art at the Royal College of Art.   He has an obvious penchant for scatty upper class girls, but there is not much love interest apart from an unexpected confession that in the 1990s his marriage was in trouble, when he went on long walks with a Belgian ex-hippy who he had met in Ethiopia.   It shows that there was much more to his life than writing about Victorian country houses and saving Spitalfields.

Mark Girouard

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Saint-Sulpice

My last post from Paris is of the side façade of Saint-Sulpice.   I had misremembered the history of the church.   The bulk of it is seventeenth-century, designed by Daniel Gittard, who completed the north portal between 1670 and 1678.   It was in 1732 that a competition was held for the design of the west façade, won by Giovanni Servandoni and based on the façade of St. Paul’s:-

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I was walking down a street near the Musée de Cluny (the Rue de l’Ecole de Médicine to be precise), I spotted an inscription recording that it was the location of the Ancienne Ecole Royale de Dessin, which was established in 1767.   In all the literature about the establishment of the Royal Academy (which is itself devoted to ‘the arts of design’), I have never seen any reference to the fact that the French King had given his blessing to an official drawing school which had been established in 1766 in what was then the rue des Cordeliers by Jean-Jacques Bachelier.   After various increases in its responsibilities to include the mechanical arts in 1823, it became L’École nationale des arts decoratifs’ in 1873.   But it still retains a fine relief of Architecture flanking its entrance portal and inside is what I suspect is the original drawing school:-

École Royale de Dessin

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Left Bank

I have tended to avoid the left bank in recent years, having long ago been put off the tourist aspects of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and Les Deux Magots. But staying next to the Sciences Po meant that I have had a chance to get to know the Faubourg Saint-Germain better, with its well preserved side streets, its antiquaires, its courtyards and gardens. I liked the scientific bookshop at 48, Rue Jacob with its display of old opticians’ equipment and eyeballs:- 

The doorways further down the street in the Rue Jacob and surrounding neighbourhood:-

The Square Gabriel-Pierne at the end of the Rue Mazarine:- 

And the Musée Delacroix:- 

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Musée de Cluny

Having been a touch disappointed by the Cloisters recently, I thought I should visit the Musée de Cluny, which is the original of this form of medieval reconstruction, established in 1843 by Alexandre de Sommerard in the old, partly medieval hotel of the abbots of Cluny:- 

An early sixteenth-century altarpiece:- 

The decapitated statues from Notre-Dame, which were vandalised during the Revolution and only rediscovered in the 1970s:- 

The head of the Queen of Sheba from the portal of the Abbaye de Saint-Denis:- 

A fox from The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries:-

A seventh-century ivory:-

The head of St. Florion from the end of the fifteenth century:-

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Musée d’Orsay

It’s a while since I’ve been able to see Gae Aulenti’s grand and slightly camp conversion of the Gare d’Orsay which opened in 1986 and caused consternation because of its relegation of the Impressionists into the attics and reinstatement of the French academic tradition:-

What I’d forgotten, or may not previously have seen are the decks of French nineteenth-century decorative arts on the first floor. This is a bust of the Comtesse de Béarn by Emile Gallé:-

A Virgin by Eugène Delaplanche:-

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L’École des Beaux Arts

As I was walking up the Rue Bonaparte, I was stopped short by a massive head of Poussin (1838 by Michel-Louis Mercier):-

As I was trying to take a photograph, not altogether successfully, the doorman kindly let me in and I was able to wander freely through the whole site, which, once upon a time, was the Musée des Monuments Francais, laid out by Alexandre Lenoir after the French Revolution. Once the Museum closed in 1816, it was given to the École des Beaux Arts, which had originally been the Academie Royale. Their architect, Francois Debret, and his brother-in-law, Felix Duban, retained many of the older elements as a palimpsest:-

The gardens are full of odd and unexpected remains:-

From here, I found myself in the Palais des Etudes, which was glassed over in 1863:-

I’ve always thought that art schools are unexpectedly good preservers of historic buildings because they are completely without sanctimony and treat buildings roughly, but with respect:-

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Maison de Verre

En route to Paris, I had luckily spotted that the Sciences Po is right next door to the Maison de Verre and that, since it was bought in 2006 by an American commodities-trader, it has generally been open on Thursday afternoon. So, at five o’clock precisely, I was granted temporary admittance to the courtyard which contains Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet’s glass facade, erected between 1928 and 1932 for Dr. Dalsace, a gynecologist, who had his offices on the ground floor. Although Dalsace was a medical practitioner, he also knew intellectuals, so I liked to imagine Walter Benjamin standing where I stood in 1934:-

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